In Memory of Bread

by Paul Graham

  What the hell was wrong with me? The Reuben had been a kamikaze; this was not so much a sabotage as a desperate attempt to make the evening feel familiar and safe, to fit in as I always had. I wanted to be normal—but cheese, olives, nuts, and wine were normal. I wanted to be the old normal, then. Unchanged. I was sure that Bec did, too.

  The New Year arrived. I noted the symbolism: new beginnings, fresh starts. I didn’t make any resolutions to do better with my elimination diet, though, because a resolution is a choice. I didn’t have a choice. I could only try harder. Figure this out. Swim against the tide. This new thing in my body, in my life, could do me serious harm in time, even kill me, but only if I let it.

  * * *

  *1 Did these natural remedies work? It’s tough to say for sure, but only the yogurt, which I couldn’t tolerate yet, seemed to hurt me. I had entered into a mental space I never thought I’d go, one where scientifically unproven treatments seemed completely legitimate, and no potential cure sounded too strange or unpalatable: a breakfast of rice grits with powdered marshmallow root and slippery elm powder, washed down with a glass of watery cactus pulp (that’d be the aloe juice), for example. It was the meanest, most desperate eating I’ve ever done.

  *2 One particularly caustic article on the Web referred to celiac disease as the trendy condition for “rich white people”—a display of ignorance that underscores the need not simply for better awareness of the disease itself, but for better education in the latest research findings on the disease. While it’s true that people of African and Latino descent are least likely to have the HLA-DQ2/8 markers, the disease affects far more groups than wealthy whites.

  *3 The antibody results gastroenterologists and celiac patients pay attention to are tissue transglutaminase (tTG), immunoglobulin A (IgA), and deamidated gliadin peptide (DGP). Together, the tests are effective at ruling out false negatives and false positives. They can also be used to evaluate compliance with the GF diet and encounters with cross-contamination.

  It was a sad, cold January day when we cleaned out the cabinets, refrigerator, pantry, and freezers of anything that would make me sick. We should have done this immediately after my diagnosis, but we had let things linger awhile because we weren’t cooking much anyway. Bec gave pounds of flour away to Sarah and Mere, her Artisan Bread co-conspirators, though we held on to the cookbook itself, like a souvenir of a place we’d once been and enjoyed tremendously but to which we were unlikely to ever return.* Our friends accepted these displaced ingredients a little guiltily and only in the interest of not seeing quality flour go into the trash. Starving people from just about anywhere, at any point in the last ten thousand years, would be happy to have that.

  We gave away boxes of pasta, crackers, bottles of soy sauce, teriyaki, and other suspicious-looking items to friends and the food pantry. We dumped other bottles down the drain and threw an entire container of bread dough into the trash. The process of elimination left the cabinets and pantry with conspicuous gaps. Just as I had never thought that wheat could make me sick, I had never imagined my kitchen without any wheat-based foods in it. I had abstained from sugar, coffee, alcohol, red meat, and fish for extended periods of time before, but I had never banished crackers, and certainly not pasta or bread. I saw these foods differently—they were essential, not luxuries, and imbued with a purity that made them unnecessary to sacrifice.

  Then we set about sanitizing. We cleansed the toaster, scrubbed the baking stone, scrutinized the pots and baking dishes, the cutting boards, the grill pan, the underside of the KitchenAid mixer’s arm, the tongs, the sheet and loaf pans. Our goal, the necessity, was to have gluten gone literally without a trace, because even a trace—one-eighth of a teaspoon, according to researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital—could make me sick. It would have been easier to throw some of these kitchen items out and buy new ones, but it mattered to me to keep them. Some had been wedding gifts. Over the years of cooking with them, I’d come to feel as if I had developed relationships with them. I knew their quirks and tendencies, and they contained history, triumphs, failures, important meals.

  In the pantry, I hesitated when I came to the pasta machine. What to do with this? It was the non-motorized, hand-crank type, shiny stainless steel, a gift from my in-laws. It weighed more than the cast-iron skillet (which also needed to be scrubbed down and then re-seasoned). The C-clamps never grabbed the countertop right, and so when I cranked the pasta through, I had to pin it down with one hand or my forearm, subduing it like an animal that wanted to slip away and plummet to the floor, where it would break my foot or kill the dog, who liked dozing at my feet despite having the whole kitchen at his disposal.

  For all its inconveniences, I loved this gadget. I loved the process of making pasta, the way three simple ingredients, eggs and flour and salt, combined to make something so deeply satisfying and wonderfully more than the sum of their parts. I loved cracking the eggs into the well of flour and swirling them together on the counter, pulling and mixing, pulling and mixing. An afternoon making any type of fresh pasta, whether linguine or spaetzle, said leisure to me; when else did I feel up to the trouble, except for those stretches when life was good? The hand motions came to me naturally, as if through some form of muscle memory I had been born with: a connection to those earliest Middle Eastern and Chinese makers of humankind’s first noodles, or to my own ancestors in Naples. I loved the golden color of the ball of dough, and the fact that no matter how many times I fed a sheet through the rollers, it never broke. That was what gluten got you—a magical tensile strength. (This was why the Chinese had come up with a far better neologism for gluten than the Romans, who drew on its “glue-like” qualities: mien chin, or “muscle of flour.”) I made sheets of lasagna so thin I could see my hand through them; or, if I was feeling lazy, I kept the noodles thick, another type of treat. When I cut fettuccine with the machine, a frustrating process because the edges weren’t sharp enough and failed to separate the noodles, leaving them in stuck-togther twos and threes, I separated and hung them from coat hangers in the dining room to dry.

  It was with this machine, with homemade pasta, that I first discovered the pleasures of “cooking up” for guests. The year I received it—I think I was thirty—I threw Bec a birthday dinner party and stole the stage, I’m not overly sad to say, by cooking homemade ravioli stuffed with a mixture of a friend’s goat cheese, puréed roasted butternut squash, roasted shallots, and sage. Shortly before the guests arrived I told Bec her job was to enjoy herself and keep me sharp. Then, for the first time, I let it rip: salad, seared lamb loin, brown butter sauce, toasted pine nuts, and the pillowy ravioli.

  I knew I couldn’t give the pasta maker away. There was, for one thing, the slimmest chance that the diagnosis was a mistake. And if nothing else, it could make for a weird but effective doorstop.

  —

  And then one afternoon, David came over and we transferred the carboys, wort chiller, sanitizer, bottle washers, and beer pot into the trunk of his car. We moved box upon box of home brew: stouts and porters, pale and red ales, IPAs and ESBs we’d cooked up while blasting classic rock on summer Saturday afternoons. I don’t think he knew what to do with all that beer. Or, he knew—you drink it, stupid—but he objected that he didn’t have room for all of it in his duplex, and that I had paid for half of it.

  I didn’t care about the money or the space. I just wanted the beer out of my house.

  He’d take it, he told me, but he would buy out my share with gluten-free beer.

  Sure, I said, thinking, If gluten-free beer is even drinkable.

  After he drove off, I removed from the fridge a remaining six-pack of Lake Placid Ubu Ale. I’d kept it back intentionally, secretly. This beer was the last glutenous foodstuff in the house: a dark, hoppy, English-style strong ale that I still find myself craving, still dream about.

  I put the beer under the counter, in the liquor cabinet. It would be good to have some beer on hand for a friend who dropped by. And
there was always a chance that the zombies might indeed invade, as everyone from some of my students to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention apparently believed. If that were to happen, it definitely would be good to have beer in the house. I would want to go out in the middle of my own street, with a .45 in one hand and a bottle of Ubu in the other. The gun was just to buy me time to drink my beer.

  Except I don’t own a gun, and the beer would be warm.

  —

  Gluten withdrawal set in right around this time. First I had to re-cleanse my body from New Year’s Eve, and then I needed to stay gluten-free. This time, I did. Since I had been suffering from headaches, mood swings, body aches, lethargy, and just about everything that withdrawal brings for months already, I do not think I felt the full force. In fact, from a physical standpoint, I felt better as my body ceased to destroy itself and my overall health improved. My wife, on the other hand, had a harder time. For a long while—several months—Bec experienced headaches, sluggishness, and, ironically, gastrointestinal symptoms. We kept waiting for her head to clear, for her body to adjust to a life without gluten, but it took longer than either of us predicted, even though she was as rigorous about maintaining the diet as I was (even more so, considering she hadn’t snuck any porter), and had gone into the change strong and healthy.

  Instead of physical or chemical withdrawal symptoms, I felt in those first weeks an emotional void. There were, in truth, not that many empty spaces in the cabinets and the refrigerator, because we had always made most of what we ate from scratch, but the missing items bothered me. And yet, we still had plenty to eat. I wasn’t even close to having a kitchen ravaged by hunger, which I knew was something that plenty of my North Country neighbors lived with every day. Instead, I was bereft. I felt bereft even when I discovered a hidden upside to iron-deficiency anemia: red meat, which we’d always consumed sparingly, had suddenly ascended to the status of health food. We live on top of some superb beef, pork, lamb, bison, and chicken farmers, and we love what they provide us, but I had never been in the habit of having a burger for lunch. During the weeks of recovery, though, I ate double bison patties with homemade bread-and-butter pickles and cheddar. “It’s a pharmaceutical!” I exclaimed as I got the burger down with gusto. But where was the roll, toasted brown yet moist and flavorful from the juices? In the midst of so much good food, it was embarrassingly easy to focus on what was not there.

  Although I didn’t want to, I had begun a running tally of all the foods I had lost, whether I was in the habit of eating them regularly or not. That didn’t matter; the fact that they were now unobtainable was what counted. The list began with bread, of course, in dozens of forms, from baguettes to limpa to whole-grain toast to croissants. Then sandwiches: Montecristos, croques monsieur, cheesesteaks from a sidewalk cart in Philadelphia. The list meandered into the first-course offerings of crostini and bruschetta and croutons atop salads, and curled into the next morning’s breakfast of French toast, English muffins with eggs Benedict, waffles, bagels, or scones. From there it zigzagged randomly and associatively: real chocolate chip cookies, egg pasta, a slice of pizza from the kind of dive joint one walks into precisely because the fact that it is a dive joint augurs good things.

  At some point I added crab cakes—it didn’t matter that I rarely ever wanted them, even though I’d been raised in Maryland. Next, a cold pint of Guinness, or even better, a black and tan like David and I made on St. Patrick’s Day with a spoon I bent backward to a right angle so as to divert the stout gently onto the lager. We used this contraption until Mere bought David a real barman’s turtle. True soy sauce with sushi instead of GF tamari didn’t matter much, but plain old oatmeal did matter, especially with raisins and almonds and maple syrup on a January morning, when NPR murmured on the radio and, outside the kitchen windows, the yard was whitewashed. Fried chicken, New England clam chowder, Louisiana gumbo, béchamel made from a classic French roux; quiche Lorraine, real apple pie, spanakopita, napoleons. I would never again pick up a warm blueberry scone at the co-op’s bakery and slide it into a wax paper sleeve for a midafternoon snack with tea. And why couldn’t they have brought out their homemade pretzels a year sooner? I would never eat most kinds of Christmas cookies, including lebkuchen, a favorite on my father’s side of the family—lard, cloves, icing, and all—and a Christmas tradition in our house until the year my mother grew suspicious of a dough so dense with saturated fat that she couldn’t stir it herself, and finally put the kibosh on them.

  Every time I thought I had reached the end of this list, had suffered through the inventory of foods that mattered, something else sprang to mind: beer-battered fish, haddock or cod, deep-fried. Traditional fish-and-chips with a bottle of pale ale. Yes, please. Just one more.

  Perhaps the expansiveness was a testament to how greedy we have become as eaters, how our minds, once trained in a certain gastronomical direction—omnivorous, in my case—refuse to bend back the other way.

  Twix bars. Ritz crackers. And Girl Scout cookies: Samoas! Tagalongs! I rarely ate these things, and I never craved them. Same for astronaut ice cream, which I tasted once at Cape Canaveral (utterly unmemorable), and which may contain gluten, as I discovered one day when I idly read the back of a package of freeze-dried Neapolitan ice cream while shopping at an outfitters store. “I’ll be damned,” I whispered, as I felt, illogically, a pang.

  I could sometimes see the questions in the eyes of people who had never needed to make such a compromise in their diets and probably never would. Okay. No more birthday cake from regular flour. I get it. But there are GF birthday cakes. No more whole-grain toast. But there is GF bread, there are GF buns for your lamb burgers with feta and wax pepper jam (furthermore, why should anyone lament, if he has lamb and feta and exotic jam?). Yes, you have to eat special food. But at the end of the day, so what? It’s still food.

  It always seemed to me a stupid question, but okay, I would bite. Taste was only part of the loss, albeit a big part. But what about the relationship between food and memory? The most famous example of the intertwining of the two is Marcel Proust’s “madeleine moment,” when as an adult on a trip back to his childhood home in Combray, France, he ate a cookie and remembered, in vivid detail, entire segments of his childhood that he had completely forgotten. The reverie started with a morsel of madeleine soaked in tea, which brought back mornings when he was watched by his aunt (who used to like the tea-soaked cookies) while his mother entertained a male suitor, M. Swann, a personage who filled the young Proust with anxiety. This memory seemed to explain, or connect to, other mysteries in Proust’s life, and what followed was a chain reaction of recollection, and a literary work that has been called a novel but is really a seven-volume magnum opus of a memoir. All from a lump of butter, sugar, and flour.

  Here is the idea that haunted me as soon as I realized just how many foods I had lost: one of Proust’s key observations is that forgotten pieces of our past can be reclaimed only randomly, through the senses, especially taste. The trigger for these recollections is in the chemicals in the food as much as in the actual taste. Such memory is completely involuntary; it’s the difference between craving a meal that reminds you of your grandmother, and eating, at a friend’s house or a restaurant, lasagna prepared exactly as your grandmother used to make it, and thinking, Wow. It’s like she’s here. And then things you had forgotten about her suddenly reappear: the slope of her shoulders as she stood at the counter; the quick, confident movements of her hands; the love in her eyes.

  I believed in these kinds of food triggers. I had been unexpectedly catapulted into reverie by them before, first with maple walnut ice cream and then upon cutting a tangy, sulfurous-smelling honeybell orange, both of which placed me in my late grandfather’s house in Florida. I had no way of knowing how many memories, how many encounters with my past, whether joyful, painful, or confounding—but always real, always significant—celiac disease would cost me. The fact that wheat and gluten were the basis of so many fo
ods suggested that many memories were now irretrievably lost.

  The bright side? I would never know what I was missing.

  * * *

  * Eventually, in 2015, the authors did release a GF version of this cookbook, but we found the results far inferior to what we thought of as the “real” version.

  In addition to our personal food memories, we also share a cultural eating history (or several of them, simultaneously), which is really a collective form of food-memory. It might be more accurate to call our history with wheat and bread a love affair, one that is around 10,000 to 12,000 years old and that began on the plains of the Fertile Crescent, which includes modern-day Iraq, Turkey, and Syria. The first cultivated wheat appeared there around 8,800 BC. Signs of wheat farming appeared in the Jordan Valley about a millennium later, in 7,800 BC. However, humans were harvesting wild wheat much earlier than that. Einkorn and emmer wheats in their wild form appear to have been first encountered around 10,000 to 12,000 BC (einkorn is now coming back after a long history primarily as animal fodder, and emmer has found prominence as farro). Several separate communities likely noticed and began collecting wild wheat grains at about the same time.